In the final section of the collection, “East, West,” Rushdie presents three short stories which merge the South Asian and Western European experiences to explore the theme of Navigating Cross-Cultural Identities. In Part 1, “East,” Rushdie focuses on the lives of characters fixed in their South Asian realities—either content with or trapped by their predictable circumstances. These stories represent the stereotypes of the harrowing “Eastern experience”. In Part 2, “West,” Rushdie focuses on characters who are obsessed by the pursuit of increasingly impossible dreams—one fantasy begetting another fantasy and leading to ultimate disappointment. These narratives represent the myths of the utopic “Western experience.” In the stories found within Part 3, “East West”—”the Harmony of the Spheres,” “Chekov and Zulu,” and “The Courter”—Rushdie presents the intersection of Eastern and Western cultural differences, contexts, and identities to explore the possibilities of achieving a unified sense of self across the diaspora.

In the story “The Harmony of the Spheres,” Eliot Crane’s paranoid schizophrenia is a metaphor for the cross-cultural experience. Eliot feels perpetually pulled between two opposing versions of himself: the calm, collected, logical iteration and the unpredictable and untrusting iteration. “When the madness came,” the narrator explains, “he was ‘barking’, and capable of the wildest excesses. But in between attacks, he was ‘perfectly normal’” (130). Eliot’s emotional, psychological, and behavioral extremes mirror the polar extremes of inhabiting conflicting cultural identities. Indeed, Eliot is constantly torn between and perpetually seeking the unification of his disparate selves—something the narrator admits that he relates to because he “was a little unhinged myself—suffering from a disharmony of my personal spheres” and unable to answer “a number of difficult questions about home and identity” (137). The narrator is not a person with schizophrenia, but he is easily drawn into Eliot’s emotional and intellectual extremes because he too feels divided between where he is from and where he is now, between his origins and his imagined future.

Rushdie further underscores these thematic notions via images, symbols, and metaphors like Eliot’s driving and Eliot’s writing. In one scene, he “accelerat[es] through blind corners on lightless country roads” before suddenly and “without warning, he braked hard and stopped” (134). After a moment’s pause, Eliot then resumed his usual speed. Eliot’s erratic sways between speeding and slowing down underscore the tension between polarizing internal convictions or polarizing cultural identities. For example, Eliot at times believes Khan is his enemy plotting against him but a moment later becomes convinced that Khan is the only person he can trust. 

The writings Khan finds after Eliot’s death reveal the same sway between extremes: The writings “were of two kinds: hate-filled, and pornographic,” either presenting “virulent attacks” on or describing “steamy sex” (144) with his closest companions. Eliot longs to bring these opposing internal forces into balance, but ultimately cannot.

The stories “Chekov and Zulu” and “The Courter” further these explorations of the irreconcilable cross-cultural identity, while expanding the collection’s theme of the Search for Home and Belonging. In “Chekov and Zulu,” the old school friends are physically divided between two geographical locations, forced to move between England and India for their work. This work also draws them across opposing political lines, too. While the characters have been lifelong friends and regard their bond as indelible, they ultimately cannot preserve their relationship. After Zulu leaves the Secret Service, Chekov feels betrayed and the friends experience a falling out. They once derived their sense of home and belonging from one another, but find that this connection cannot withstand larger political and social forces working against them. The allusions to Star Trek throughout the story are a metaphor for the unattainable home beyond the corporeal world. Zulu and Chekov once believed they had this “home” in one another—a belonging they hoped could transcend space and time.

In “The Courter,” the narrator seeks his own sense of home, belonging, and identity in remembering his childhood nanny. This narrative has a nostalgic and melancholic mood which echoes the narrator’s state of mind. Now a grown man living beyond the confines of his parents’ home, the narrator is trying to reconcile his past and present lives. Indeed, when he hears from Certainly-Mary, he is immediately overcome by a sense of guilt “about having done so little for Mary over the years” (178). Writing her story in the narrative present is the narrator’s way of atoning for his disregard for Certainly-Mary, and seeking catharsis to his unresolved past and unreconciled cultural identities. Certainly-Mary, as well as Mixed-Up, represent the narrator’s South Asian family, upbringing, and personal history. When he remembers them, he is able to fleetingly reconnect with his origins and to access some buried part of his South Asian identity. At the end of the short story, the narrator admits that around the time Certainly-Mary was leaving England to return to India, he was pursuing a British citizenship. Certainly-Mary understood that the only way for her to find internal peace and to reconcile with the racial violence she’d experienced in London was to return to her homeland. Concurrently, the young narrator sought a British passport because he believed the only way to escape his father’s influence would be to identify himself in opposition to his father. Achieving internal balance meant casting off one version of self in exchange for the other. He does claim at the story’s end that getting his citizenship “did, in many ways, set me free” (211). However, the closing image of the narrator seeking out the people from his past at his childhood home suggests that he remains divided between his cross-cultural identities—perpetually longing for whichever one he cannot tangibly access.